The present invention relates to systems for publishing and distributing custom compilations of available books, articles and related published and unpublished matter that are prepared or specified for instructional courses.
Historically, instructional materials have been marketed and sold by directly approaching instructors employed at educational institutions via a publisher's sales representative and advertising campaigns through the mail and, most recently, through order placement from online catalogs provided by the websites of major publishing houses. Shipping costs and returns are born by the publisher, as well as sampling of books as promotional materials. Small circulation textbooks are expensive, due to both the high fixed and variable costs of traditional publishing. The textbooks must then be ordered by local bookstores or educational institutions in quantities sufficient to serve the anticipated class enrollment.
Prior modes of selecting and distributing instructional materials include the traditional route of an instructor selecting a textbook that best coincides with the curriculum that is expected to be taught. Instructors tend to be very selective when choosing which portions of available books and supporting materials are to be used for their classes. Students therefore are customarily saddled with purchasing a very expensive set of educator materials that will be only partially used for required course work. Moreover, instructors are usually limited in their choice of educational materials in rapidly evolving fields since the availability and quality of available textbooks become outmoded and include errors that will not be corrected until another edition goes to print.
The costs of such an inefficient system are not only reflected in the price of books, which is ultimately borne by students, but in the difficulty of meeting the needs of instructors seeking educational materials for course instruction, and in supplying students with current content in a timely manner.